StackSafe, Inc., a provider of pre-deployment staging and testing solutions for IT Operations teams, announced today that the company has been declared the winner of the National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer’s 2008 National University Start-Up Competition. After various presentations to VC, angel investor and university judges, StackSafe emerged from 400 competing university startups as an elite investment-worthy company.
“It’s a great accomplishment to be viewed as a leader in this competition,” said Loren Burnett, CEO and President of StackSafe. “We’re proud that StackSafe has been recognized for its effort in creating a solution designed to cut costs for businesses by minimizing the production problems of IT teams.”
StackSafe, a Columbia University spin-off, provides solutions that enable IT teams to significantly improve pre-deployment testing in order to reduce costly production problems and downtime that drain valuable time and resources from IT departments. Its flagship product, StackSafe Test Center, combines staging, testing and reporting capabilities to predict IT complications brought on by configuration changes, upgrades, or patches.
Accenture has released the Accenture Green Technology Suite. It is a set of tools to help an organization assess its environmental standing and provide some recommendations to reduce its carbon footprint by improving the way IT is managed.
The flash based tool gives a view across the entire IT organization. It provides detailed assessments of where the company is within a maturity spectrum and suggests IT initiatives to address the company’s carbon footprint.
The tools also help calculate the impact of specific initiatives in terms of workplace environmental efficiency and data center energy savings.
The Accenture Green Technology Suite includes:
The Accenture Green Maturity Model – assesses the environmental efficiency of IT, suggesting actions to improve the organization’s overall environmental standing.
Based on the responses to 300 questions across five key areas – working practice, office environment, data center, procurement, and corporate citizenship – on topics ranging from commitment to reducing CO2 emissions, to type of enterprise network, the maturity model produces a comprehensive scorecard that rates where the organization sits on the green maturity spectrum on a scale from zero to five.
Aternity Inc. announced today the results of its survey, “IT Management: Key Drivers and Challenges in 2008.” More than 70 senior IT and Line-of-Business (LOB) professionals participated in the survey, ranking their key IT priorities for 2008 and sharing their perspective on end user experience management strategies and best practices.
The top five priorities and key IT challenges for 2008 according to survey respondents in order of importance:
Proactive Problem Detection (35.6 percent)
Gaining a more proactive handle on IT problems before the impact is felt by end users or upon business productivity and performance. This is a key function of proactive management and one of the most beneficial aspects to it. Investment in monitoring software and services is expected to grow 45 percent between 2005 and 2011.
Server Virtualization (21.9 percent)
With a constant need to increase do more with less; server virtualization is a growing industry. With server virtualization, you can consolidate workloads of underutilized server machines onto a smaller number of fully utilized machines. Fewer physical machines can lead to reduced costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead, plus the creation of a more dynamic IT infrastructure.
As IT systems and services grow so does the need for an expanded IT Help Desk to support them. If you find you are outgrowing your present call support system one solution is a virtual call center software suite such as the one by Five9. It allows you to operate a best-in-class call center without the expense of in-house equipment.
USCB a medical and financial receivables company recently implemented Five9’s hosted virtual call center software. “Flexibility is key,” said IT Manager, Pedro Guijarro. “At any given time, we run multiple campaigns in several departments. Patients contact our call centers for account inquiries and invoice questions. We broadcast payment alerts and account status. Five9 is very effective and reliable for our operations. With management reporting tools, we measure our productivity each day. By analyzing call volume data, we re-direct agent queues to follow-up on the most critical collections. Delivering positive cash flow early in the account cycle impacts our clients’ bottom-lines.”
IT Operations professionals are faced with the constant worry of threats such as IT outages, power failures, and disasters. During challenging financial times IT Operations is finding it more difficult to secure the funding needed for disaster recovery from management.
Disaster recovery preparedness can run into millions of dollars depending of the level of continuity you desire and the size of your company. Since the ROI is often seen as how to avoid what might happen, management is often unwilling to properly fund these efforts.
Given the potential loss to the business should such disaster or even a power outage occur IT operations should approach management with facts and cost effective solutions.
Close to 71 percent of U.S. retailers are turning to a broad set of virtualization solutions as way to save money, maximize space and gain better control of their IT infrastructures according to Microsoft’s “Virtualization in Retail Survey 2008″.
The editorial staff at Computerworld has released a guide “Get Up to Speed on Green IT”. The guide gives an overview of three areas that IT can save energy and money by going green.
Data centers are large users of energy. Rising energy costs and data center expansions have IT departments looking at green options. The guide list seven steps to a green data center.
Microsoft announced on April 15, 2008 that they had “inadvertently” published to WSUS servers the Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) notifications update (KB949810) for 24 hours. Intended as a trial of an anti-piracy program, it was meant for a limited distribution to only to Chile, Italy, Spain and Turkey.
The OGA program is intended to display nagging notices on copies of Microsoft Office it deems illegal. As a result of the mistake Microsoft Office admin’s are on the warpath trying to figure out why their software was deemed to be illegal and how they can fix the problem. Some companies report their entire inventory of Office products are now reporting that they need activation.
Microsoft released an official statement addressed to WSUS Admin’s on the Microsoft WSUS Team Blog. They explain what happened, but not how it happened. Microsoft is offering their “full assistance” to anyone having problems or questions.
If you were among those unlucky enough to receive this update a good place to start is the following Microsoft forum thread “Questions regarding KB949810” . The notices would appear on machines running copies of Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2007.
Today most companies are suffering through tough financial times. Every manager and department head in the company is being challenged to reduce expenditures. It is the role of IT leadership to find solutions to reduce costs while maintaining and improving IT services. The key to any change is to start it. You do not have to do everything at once, but pick a starting point and start TODAY.
Microsoft’s new launch event promotion “Heroes Happen {Here}” is aimed at IT Professionals and Developers. The events are to promote the new Windows Server® 2008 operating system, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008, and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 platforms.
Events are being held is 61 locations nationwide in the United States and many other locations worldwide. As part of their thanks for attending you get to take home copies of the three platforms. The events begin February 27th in Los Angeles and continue until June 9th in Tampa.
